


Spar Wars

by atamascolily



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Confused Steve Rogers, Crack Treated Seriously, Crossover, Gen, Jedi Training, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-ESB Luke, Sparring, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, That's Not How The Force Works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 21:14:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13983462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atamascolily/pseuds/atamascolily
Summary: When he goes to work out in the SHIELD gym, Steve Rogers meets Luke, a strange young man with a tragic background who's surprisingly good with a sword. Good enough to keep up with a super-soldier, even.





	Spar Wars

When Steve Rogers arrived at the gym in the basement of SHIELD's DC headquarters, there was a skinny blond kid wailing on one of the punching bags with a wooden sword. _Now there's something you don't see every day,_ he thought, and leaned against the doorway to watch the show. 

He didn't come down here very often--he preferred running in the open air before dawn to any exercise indoors these days, looping round the Tidal Basin as many times as he could in an hour. With the commuters and the tourists asleep, it was just him alone with his thoughts in the world, the echo of his footsteps on the pavement and the steady rasp of his breath. It was almost peaceful. 

But he'd just come out of another infuriating meeting upstairs with one of the more obnoxious career bureaucrats--Fury and Hill were out with the rest of their people this week, so he was stuck with the desk jockies until they got back-- to find it pouring rain outside with gale force winds that only soured his mood further. So he shrugged his shoulders, and took the elevator down to the gym instead to take out his frustrations on SHIELD's equipment. He needed the exquisite sense of relief that could only come from solidly punching things he pretended were HYDRA agents until his hands were sore or the bag broke under the assault, whichever came first. These days, it was usually the bag. 

He never would have thought to use a sword, though. 

Steve had seen a lot of weird things in his unexpectedly long and varied career, but swords in combat were a new thing for him. Maybe the Japanese had used them during WWII, but they certainly hadn't come up much in the European theater. Steve was fond of improvising weapons when he had to, but he considered the sword more or less obsolete in melee combat since the invention of firearms, and he didn't see that changing anytime soon. Yet here was this kid--who couldn't be older than twenty-- with his scruffy blond hair falling just past his ears in a clipped bowl cut that had gone out of fashion decades ago (now _there_ was a feeling he could relate to)--slamming the punching bag over and over again with a stick carved to resemble a katana. It was not what he had expected. 

What was even more surprising was that the young man was actually pretty good at this. 

Steve folded his arms over his chest and watched for a few minutes, increasingly fascinated by the spins, dives, dodges and feints the kid delivered to the air--all ending with sharply defined cuts to the top or the side of the bag, with enough force to generate an explosive "whumpf" every time. He knew from personal experience that you had to hit pretty hard to do something like that. Whoever the hell this kid was, he was stronger than he looked. 

_So, not like me at all at his age, then._ He'd been scrawny and weak before Dr. Erskine's serum had turned him into a super-soldier for Uncle Sam. Hopefully, this kid had had a happier adolescence than Steve had, with fewer beatings and bullies. 

(Considering he was here at SHIELD headquarters, though, the odds were definitely against it.) 

The thing that intrigued Steve the most was the kid's speed. His moves were unusual all right--graceful and flowing, almost like a dance--but he did it all at a tempo that Steve had never seen before in an unaugmented mortal. Did SHIELD have another super-soldier project that they'd been keeping from him all this time? Or was there something else going on? 

"Hey." Steve cleared his throat and stepped towards the stranger, careful to keep out of range in case he was easily startled. Steve could dodge pretty much anything, of course, but it was just good etiquette. "You're pretty good with that thing. What's your name?" 

The young man lowered the sword, slid it into his waistband for safekeeping, and turned towards him. "Hi," he said, with a nonchalant wave, as if he'd been aware of Steve the entire time and had waited for him to make the first move. "You must be Captain Rogers. I'm Luke Skywalker. A pleasure to meet you." 

They shook hands. Luke's grip was strong and sure, but earnest in a way that Steve had never seen in a SHIELD agent before. _Weirder and weirder..._ It probably wasn't a threat, but unexplained oddities always triggered his danger instincts, and he could never relax until they were resolved. 

"I haven't seen you around here before," Steve said, attempting to fish for information in what he hoped was a sufficiently casual manner. "You come here often, or does SHIELD keep you too busy?"

"Actually, I don't work for SHIELD. Not directly. I'm a Jedi." 

"JEDI?" Stve was nonplussed to discover yet another layer to the byzantine complexities of American intelligence agencies. It didn't sound like an acronym--must be some sort of code name. It was the sort of thing Romanov would know. "They use swords much?" 

"Old tradition. More elegant than guns, my teacher used to say. More civilized, too." 

"Civilized, huh?" Privately, Steve didn't think there was anything civilized about two men--or two women, for that matter--fighting tooth and nail to kill each other, no matter what weapon they were using--but he kept his opinion to himself. "Who was your teacher? Anybody I know?" 

Luke shrugged. "Doubt it. Ben--I mean, General Kenobi--was in semi-retirement for the last two decades before we started training together. Sadly, I didn't have much time with him--." 

"What happened to him?" 

"Something went wrong on our first mission--" Luke cut himself off abruptly, as if he'd said too much. Steve thought he knew why. 

"It's okay, kid. I have clearance for this sort of thing," Steve reassured him. "You were saying?" 

"There was this _big_ naval station out in the South China Sea--nuclear-powered, the size of a small moon, capable of destroying the whole planet if they felt like it. They called it the 'Death Star'--" 

_It probably had 'Stark Industries' written all over it,_ Steve thought sourly. Howard and Tony were friends, but their company had done more for war than it had for peace when you started examining the balance sheets, and he didn't like it. This sounded like the sort of thing Tony would have done before he'd nearly gotten himself blown up in Afghanistan a few years back. 

"--we had an agent--my partner, a real princess when she wants to be--get the plans to us via robot courier, but she was compromised and captured. We found a weakness in a small thermal exhaust port we could use to shoot proton torpedoes inside and bypass the outer defenses--" 

Hmm. It wasn't like Tony to leave such an obvious flaw in one of his designs. Maybe it wasn't a Stark Industries thing, then. 

"--so I got her out while Ben disabled the alarms, but he never made it back to our ship. He distracted this double agent, Vader, so we could get away, but he died in the process--"

Luke sighed. "Vader used to be one of us. He was Ben's student before he went rogue and murdered a lot of Jedi back in the day. Dresses all in black, wears a mask. Likes to choke people." 

"I've met the type," Steve said, though Red Skull hadn't bothered to wear a mask. "Go on." 

Luke's lips curled in an expression that was equal grief and disgust. "Vader killed my father when I was very young. My aunt and uncle raised me. He killed them, too." 

Ouch. So much for a happy childhood, then. No wonder he'd ended up in one of SHIELD's affiliates. He was exactly the sort of recruit people like Fury always looked for--talented, malleable, and craving revenge. 

"I'm sorry to hear that," Steve said quietly, and meant it. "So you're training to avenge him?" 

Luke didn't meant his eyes. "That's right."

Steve made a decision. It was stupid and reckless, of course, but he figured he could pull him punches if he had to. Besides, he was genuinely curious. "Want to spar? Show me what you can do? I bet I'm a better opponent than that punching bag." 

Luke nodded. "But you don't have a sword," he pointed out. 

"I don't need one. Just try to hit me. Give it your best shot." He put both his fists up in a defensive crouch. "Come on!" 

Luke drew the wooden katana out of his belt and held it with both hands in a fighting stance, closing his eyes for a brief moment before focusing on Steve's face with a calm intensity. "Ready when you are," he said--and lunged. 

Luke got a hit in before Steve had a chance to react. He blinked and pretended he had done it on purpose. "Good. And, again--" 

He eventually got the hang of dodging Luke's blows, but the kid was able to get several more in on him than he would have preferred. If that sword were sharp, he'd be in serious trouble right now, super-serum or no. 

As Steve had suspected from his earlier observations, Luke moved faster than anyone he'd ever fought before--as if he'd been doused with Erskine's serum, although that couldn't possibly be true. Luke was far too skinny for that. It had to be something else. 

They continued for what felt like hours but was probably only fifteen minutes in real-time when Steve raised his hand for a halt. "Not bad, kid. Not bad at all. Where'd you learn to fight?" 

"It's called the Force," Luke said earnestly. Steve could heard the capital F and braced himself for some mystical martial arts bullshit. "All Jedi use it." 

"Uh-huh," Steve said, still unconvinced. "How does it work?" 

"Ben used to make me practice blindfolded," Luke said, as if that explained everything. "He'd get out this floating remote that shot laser bolts at me, and I'd have to block them without seeing them." 

Another best-selling innovation from Stark Industries, no doubt. Steve gave up. He doubted he was going to get a better explanation and the kid seemed genuinely sincere. "Maybe I should try that some time. I haven't a workout this good in a long time," he said, and meant it. 

They shook hands again. "You around much?" Steve asked. 

Luke shook his head. "Shipping out to the swamps next week for training with Ben's old teacher. It's been a pain in the ass to get him out of retirement. He's old-fashioned and cranky as hell. They say he's, like, nine hundred years old and kind of a troll. Great warrior, though." 

(Steve had the mental image of a wizened grey creature skulking under a bridge, before he remembered that it was modern slang for an Internet provacateur. This did not seem like the sort of conduct becoming top brass, even for an eccentric, but he let it go. Not his problem.) 

"Well, it was an honor to spar with you. Good luck with that Vader fellow. I'm sure you'll take him out next time your paths cross. Let me know how it goes." 

"Thank you, Captain. That's really encouraging, especially coming from you. My partner--she treats me like I'm an idiot most of the time." 

Luke flushed, and Steve had to fight to hide his smile. The kid's crush was obvious. 

"Women," agreed Steve sympathetically. He'd had similar exchanges on occasion with Romanov when their joint missions hadn't gone as smoothly as planned, though she spent most of her time trying to set him up with other women. "Give this Vader guy hell for me, okay?" 

"I will," said Luke, as he headed out the door, wooden sword still in hand, just as two SHIELD agents were coming in. They gave him a strange look as he passed, but the kid walked right by as if they weren't even there, whistling cheerfully as he rounded the corner out of Steve's line of sight. 

_Nice kid,_ Steve thought to himself. _Shame about his father and his teacher._ He hoped it would all work out. 

But there was something definitely odd about Luke Skywalker, and Steve wasn't quite sure what to make of it. He shouldn't have been able to match Steve's pace so easily. How the hell was that even possible without augmentation? Maybe there was something to this martial arts business, after all.... 

Several weeks later, when he asked Romanov about it, she thought he was pulling her leg and refused to cooperate. "JEDI isn't a real organization anymore," she told him. It was disbanded a long time ago when all of its agents were killed. Most people don't remember it ever existed or if they do, they think it's a myth." 

_The hell,_. "Well, somebody brought it back," Steve insisted. 

"Maybe you saw a ghost." 

"A ghost that hit me with a sword!" 

"Your reflexes are failing you, old man," she laughed. When he failed to take the bait, she leaned back in her chair with both feet on the desk in that sloppy way that Steve hated, and smiled at him. "Fine. Assuming this kid was legit, he must be in pretty deep cover," she said thoughtfully. "I've been through some of those myself back in the day. A lot of work to set up, but effective if you want to truly disappear." 

"Well, let me know if you can dig anything up about him," said Steve, unwilling to let the mystery go, even though he was pretty sure she was only humoring him. 

"Sure thing, Rogers," Romanov agreed readily--too readily. She was definitely not serious. "He sounds kinda cute the way you describe him. I'll see what I can dig up." 

Steve thought about the way Luke's face had flushed when he talked about his partner. "I think he's already got a girlfriend," he warned her. 

Romanov made a little moue of disappointment. "You should focus on your own love life, Rogers. Have you called Karen from accounting yet? I gave you her number ages ago--" 

But if she ever found out more about Luke Skywalker or JEDI, he never heard anything about it.


End file.
